It stars the voices of Noriko Hidaka, Chika Sakamoto and Hitoshi Takagi, and focuses on two young sisters and their interactions with friendly wood spirits in postwar rural Japan.

In 1950s Japan, university professor Tatsuo Kusakabe and his daughters Satsuki and Mei (approximately ten and four years old, respectively) move into an old house close to the hospital where the girls' mother, Yasuko, is recovering from a long-term illness.

[4] After working on 3000 Miles in Search of a Mother, Miyazaki wanted to make a "delightful, wonderful film" that would be set in Japan with the idea to "entertain and touch its viewers, but stay with them long after they have left the theaters".

[5]: 8  The director based Mei on his niece,[7] and Totoros as "serene, carefree creatures" that were "supposedly the forest keeper, but that's only a half-baked idea, a rough approximation".

[5]: 5, 103 Art director Kazuo Oga was drawn to the film when Hayao Miyazaki showed him an original image of Totoro standing in a satoyama.

[8] Oga's conscientious approach to My Neighbor Totoro was a style the International Herald Tribune recognized as "[updating] the traditional Japanese animist sense of a natural world that is fully, spiritually alive".

A great part of this sense comes from Oga's evocative backgrounds, which give each tree, hedge and twist in the road an indefinable feeling of warmth that seems ready to spring into sentient life.

[5]: 33  The film was originally set to be an hour long but during production it grew to respond to the social context, including the reason for the move and the father's occupation.

For example, ripples were designed with "two colors of high-lighting and shading" and the rain for My Neighbor Totoro was "scratched in the cels" and superimposed for it to convey a soft feel.

[5]: 154 The music for My Neighbor Totoro was composed by Joe Hisaishi, who previously collaborated with Miyazaki on the movies Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky.

Hisaishi was inspired by the contemporary composers Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage, and described Miyazaki's films as "rich and personally compeling".

[12] After writing and filming Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), Hayao Miyazaki began directing My Neighbor Totoro for Studio Ghibli.

Miyazaki's film was financed by executive producer Yasuyoshi Tokuma, and both My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies were released on the same bill in 1988.

[24] In 1989, US-based company Streamline Pictures produced an exclusive English language dub of My Neighbor Totoro for use as an in-flight movie on Japan Airlines flights.

The company reissued My Neighbor Totoro, as well as Castle in the Sky, and Kiki's Delivery Service, with updated cover art highlighting its Studio Ghibli origins, on March 2, 2010, coinciding with the US DVD and Blu-ray debut of Ponyo.

Film critic Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times identified My Neighbor Totoro as one of his "Great Movies", calling it "one of the lovingly hand-crafted works of Hayao Miyazaki".

In his review, Ebert said the film "is based on experience, situation and exploration—not on conflict and threat", and added: it would never have won its worldwide audience just because of its warm heart.

[62]Steve Rose from The Guardian gave the film five stars, praising Miyazaki's "rich, bright, hand-drawn" animation and describing it as "full of benign spirituality, prelapsarian innocence and joyous discovery, all rooted in a carefully detailed reality".

[65] Writing for the London Evening Standard, Charlotte O'Sullivan praised the charm of the film but said it lacks complexity in comparison with Spirited Away.

[66] Jordan Cronk from Slant awarded the film three-and-a-half stars but said it is "devoid of much of the fantasia of Miyazaki's more outwardly visionary work".

Klady described the film's environment as "obviously aimed at an international audience" but "evinces a disorienting combination of cultures that produces a nowhere land more confused than fascinating".

[70] Matthew Leyland of Sight & Sound reviewed the DVD released in 2006, commenting; "Miyazaki's family fable is remarkably light on tension, conflict and plot twists, yet it beguiles from beginning to end ... what sticks with the viewer is the every-kid credibility of the girls' actions as they work, play and settle into their new surroundings".

[77] The Financial Times recognized the character's appeal, commenting Totoro "is more genuinely loved than Mickey Mouse could hope to be in his wildest—not nearly so beautifully illustrated—fantasies".

[79][80][81][82] According to the environmental journal Ambio, My Neighbor Totoro "has served as a powerful force to focus the positive feelings that the Japanese people have for satoyama and traditional village life".

[83] The fund, started in 1990 after the film's release, held an auction in August 2008 at Pixar Animation Studios to sell over 210 original paintings, illustrations, and sculptures inspired by My Neighbor Totoro.

[87] Toy Story 3's art director Daisuke Tsutsumi is married to Miyazaki's niece, who inspired the character Mei in My Neighbor Totoro.

Following the request of the paper's authors, the species was named for the character because he "uses a many-legged animal as a vehicle, which according to the collectors resembles a velvet worm".

[89] In Japan in May 1988, Tokuma published a four-volume series of ani-manga books, which use color images and lines directly from My Neighbor Totoro.

The sequel focuses on the character Mei Kusakabe from the original film and her one-night adventures with Kittenbus, the offspring of Catbus, and other cat-oriented vehicles.

[104] In May 2022, the Royal Shakespeare Company and composer Joe Hisaishi announced that a stage adaptation of the film titled My Neighbor Totoro would run from 8 October 2022 to 21 January 2023 at the Barbican Centre in London.